Improved Footnotes from Ancestry.com import

Starting to delve into bringing my Ancestry.com research tree into my RootsMagic master database and encountering various issues such as duplication, media download, verbose and truncated sources. The media download was solved by buying Family Tree Maker 2012 and syncing a new FTM database to the Ancestry Family Tree; there will be things to resolve such as file naming and location but that's another discussion. Duplication may be best addressed with RM's Merge Duplicates plus my own SQLite Duplicate Name Search but it would be preferable to have a file comparison utility rather than throwing everything together - another story. Ancestry database Sources are what I want to address here.

I have identified a bug in both Ancestry's GEDCOM download generator and its Tree Sync process that results in truncation of the GEDCOM PUBL value at the 256th character. Reported to Ancestry Tech Support who have yet to confirm and acknowledge that it is their problem. So can't do anything about that apart from manually opening each Ancestry source on Ancestry.com and copying the rest of the value from there into my RM Master Source.

What I have tackled is the verbose Footnote that we get in RM from the values sent by Ancestry (only to be made even moreso when they fix that truncation bug). The first step in this process is to abbreviate the Master Source Footnote and Short Footnote. This could be done manually but, naturally, I took even longer to come up with a somewhat automated procedure. It is described on the new page Ancestry.com and RootsMagic 5.

My next step will be to convert these Free Form sources to !MyFreeForm3 and seek to shrink the Short Footnote citation.

What I think this points to is the desirability of giving the user control over the mapping of GEDCOM tags for Sources to RM fields - another wish list item. So this message could just as well be under Discussion or Issues but maybe some other Ancestry/RootsMagic users will find it as a beneficial Tip and Hint. ;-)